What is Anywhere Operations?

Anywhere Operations is a model for organizing an IT organization that provides support for customer service, virtual worker and employee access, employee support and motivation, and product deployment from anywhere with no regard to the physical location of assets or people.

As a result, anywhere operations can provide the fundamentals for enhanced services, such as collaboration and productivity across teams, secure remote access for all, cloud enablement, enhanced automation and autonomy, and other novel features. Anywhere operations is rapidly gaining traction in the marketplace in response to the workforce shift that started as a result of the impacts of COVID-19.

Organizations need to look no further than the COVID-19 pandemic to understand how anywhere operations can impact virtually every business. The year 2020 brought major changes in the way business operations function and how their customers interact with them.

Even when the current crisis has passed, employees will continue to seek those organizations that will offer flexibility in their workplace. As businesses re-think the workplace at a macro scale it is clear that a remote workforce will be the new normal from now on.

Additionally, customers who have been demanding a better user experience including a richer digital experience from the companies they deal with will continue to do so. Customers expect to engage in a multi-channel, virtual manner, and to do so anywhere, anytime, from any device. Thus, businesses must provide enhanced digital services, and the underpinnings of anywhere operations will become increasingly important.

Many systems will require modernization or changes. For example, if a customer-facing mobile application is designed to allow self-service checking on order status, the back-end system that handles order processing must be able to communicate with the systems that power the mobile applications, even if they reside in different data centers or clouds. This can be achieved by moving on-premises infrastructure into the cloud or by adopting a microservices, API-based link between the disparate applications to enable seamless communications between them.

Anywhere operations are a superset of remote work, however, the anywhere operations model goes far beyond employees working from home. Some additional benefits of anywhere operations are:

• Going beyond employees to add customers and other constituents in the access model, rather than just supporting employees and contractors
  
• Provision of secure remote access that enables teams to collaborate and work effectively as if they were on-premises, without opening up users, infrastructure, or networks to cyberthreats
• Inclusion of collaboration tools to enhance the ability to work together regardless of location
• Provision for interactivity and commerce once relegated to in-person transactions, such as buying a new car from a computer or making bank deposits by photographing a check with a smartphone.

Because anywhere operations goes beyond the workforce to embrace customers, there are opportunities to automate a broad range of processes and functions, bringing together information from multiple previously siloed applications to enable self-service for a broad range of customer interactions and transactions.

Anywhere operations encompasses new management solutions that can couple decentralized infrastructure, grating teams that include employees and customers access to information from any location, regardless of where people are accessing that information from. In this manner, anywhere operations enables a more resilient and flexible business, provides more choices for both employers and customers, and takes away geographic boundaries.